


it's tense and taut

by koedeza



Series: prompts [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, John negative, Worried Dean, sam keeps going even though he needs a break whats new, teen!chesters, tired!sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 03:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16110176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koedeza/pseuds/koedeza
Summary: based on the prompt "I'm really tired"or in which sam is exhausting himself but he finally feels free





	it's tense and taut

The apartment is small and rickety, so he pads silently like a preying animal. Grabs a pair of sneakers, some worn socks, (holes in the toes) and opens the door to their room.

Quiet, because he knows it was all silence in the beginning. Quiet, because he knows enough to understand the ire of John Winchester.  _Quiet._  He keeps it that way.

“Sammy?”

He stops looks down at his bare feet with the twitch of an eye. Something always disturbs the way things are meant to go. Quiet, and he can’t exactly keep it that way.

“Yeah.” Sam grabs a loose fiber of carpet with his toes, pulling until it’s taut and tense. “Going on a run,”

“Again?”

“Yeah.” He lets the fiber snap down. “Again.”

“Fuckin’ overachiever. Meet at the diner?” Dean mumbles from the bottom bunk, sleep congesting his words.

Sam nods, knowing that Dean’s watching him through half-lidded eyes, staring through the hazy dark of the room.

“S’ not worth it Sam.” Dean suddenly mutters, all the sleep gone from his voice.

“It doesn’t matter, not to me.” Sam looks back at the figure in the bottom bunk and slips out of the room.

He’s quiet while he’s at it.

-x-

When Sam feels most alive, he pounds on the blacktop, feet going a million miles an hour.

It’s the beginning, after all.

He runs past long fields of wheat and into the rising sun, eyes never looking down. Pick-ups rumble past, and he keeps stretching out into the long road. He runs past frayed farmhouses and adjusted people and everything that you’d think is in the middle of nowhere.

It’s not the way the air is windless or the loud smack his feet make on the ground, it’s not the roaring blood in his hears or the skin he feels tearing off the back of his ankles. Instead, it’s the way he can taste his own defiance in the air, the way everything is new and godless before dawn. The way nothing has any ties to it yet, the way nothing is compromised.

It’s dawn and he’s free.

He breathes in and laughs, letting puffs of air escape from his mouth. Rebellion, he knows the word, but that’s not what he’d call this. No, this is a controlled escape, like a dog tugging it’s rope further and further until the tension has it ready to snap.

-x-

An hour and a half later, he’ll be at the back of a diner, taking off his ruined Converse and bloody socks, rinsing them and his mangled feet with the hose. His feet are too wide for Converse, and running in them makes him get blisters and tears the skin off his Achilles heel but he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter.

It’s the beginning, after all.  


Early morning and he’s dropping his shoes on the dying grass, leaving them to dry in the blistering Arkansas sun. He raises the hem of his shirt up to his face and dries off sweat, blindly walking out to the front of the diner.

“Samantha!”

Sam lowers his shirt and looks up just in time to be hit by a pair of projectile shoes. He catches them and grabs onto a wall, pulling his sore calves behind him as he pulls them on. He tries not to look at his older brother.

“Come on, let’s eat.” Dean waves a hand and Sam follows, wearily eyeing the people around them to see if their dad isn’t one of the faces mingling in the crowd. 

This isn’t anything new, even though he tells himself it’s always new, and being on the lookout is second nature anyway. If he lies to himself enough, he can think he’s looking for monsters or hidden danger. If it’s all threatening what’s the difference anyway.  


“You smell  _ripe_ , Jesus, how far’d you run today?” Dean asks as they both slide into a booth, nose crinkling in disgust,

“Couple miles.” Sam flips open the menu even though he already knows he’ just gonna get black coffee and some eggs. It’s new, he says it’s new, it’s all brand freakin’ new.

“You know, I think it’s great you’re trying to build up stamina or whatever the hell, but if dad finds out I don’t think the man will be happy. Even if it seems like you’re getting faster.” There’s a dubious look on Dean’s face and logic behind his words. Maybe more than Sam cares to admit.

“This isn’t for him.” Sam lets the menu fall to the table and looks out the window at the bustle of people, at the start of the day. “It’s for me.” He tries not to smile and glances down at his feet, revels in the stinging of his exposed cuts and the soreness in his legs and the breath he can’t quite catch.

He runs every morning, ruins his shoes and his feet, and then runs again in the afternoon, the same exact forsaken route. The long stretch of road where he puffs out his breath and becomes ecstatic and shouts out with the thought of choosing to do it himself. No, John doesn’t tell him to go run in the mornings, doesn’t tell him to push everything he has until he can beat Dean. It never happens in the mornings.

And that’s the fucking beauty of it.

-x-

After school, late in the evening when the sun’s about to set, John Winchester has his boys running miles of Arkansas stretch, even if in the coming dark the ground isn’t visible.

He sees Sam’s damp converse and lets out a low growl of disapproval, his eyes never leaving the road in front of the tiny apartment. Tells him to run in those shoes, so Sam nods and pretends he hasn’t been told every other night. John’s eyes stay focused on the sunset and the end of all things. Sam knows that look mimics it in the morning when everything is fresh again.

“You gonna beat him today, Sam?” John asks, eyes focused, eyes glued, eyes not completely settled.

Sam rubs his ankles and lines up next to Dean on the road, ready for the Winchester Olympics, ready for the competition of who’s better, who’s stronger, who has what it takes not to get killed. As if a race can determine any of that. 

That’s how it’s always been though, and it doesn’t settle well with Sam.

As Dean flicks his eyes to him, glancing to his side with a hint of worry and a whole lot of confusion, Sam shakes his head, not quite reaching a no. They both know what he’s going to do, they both know he’s going to lose on purpose. 

“Mm, I don’t think so sir.” Sam lets himself smile and waits for no response. Nothing he hasn’t heard before, won’t hear again.

They’re off, blasting like bullets, running like they’re going to reach the sun. No one ever reaches the sun though, Sam would know. He knows because he’s tried and he’s been tested. Day after day and he’s only learned one thing.

Sometimes to reach the sun you have to get a little burnt.

-x-

On the fourth mile, his lungs don’t fill up anymore.

He stumbles, catches on the rocks and gravel of the road, crashing downonly to get back up, legs and arms scraped, covered in ash and dirt. Sam only runs faster, because he has nothing left to lose, not when he’s already decided how things are going to happen. Dean’s far ahead, sprinting past the wheat and out of his vision. John takes the Pala down the backroads of Arkansas all the way to the diner. Sam knows what’s waiting for him there, the punishment of being forced to run back home. 

He gets there late, he gets there bloody, and Dean looks at him with sorry eyes and John looks at him like the smiling dark, all bite and vacant of hope. Sam almost wants to announce it to the world how this is all his choice. 

He doesn’t. 

John and Dean climb into the Pala and Sam stands watching, hearing the engine rumble off. The soles of his shoes are coming off, and his eyes are getting blurry, and he wants to run until his everything is pulling at the seams. Until he’s the little carpet fiber, ready to snap. 

When he can’t hear the car anymore, Sam runs back, stomach rumbling and sweat pouring down his back, eyes burning in the night. He’ll get back late, he knows that. He wants that, almost.

He needs it, because he knows its ending and he knows tomorrow is going to be the beginning again and that’s only ever true if he feels it for himself.

Sam runs in the morning, when it’s night to day and when life is rising from the dark and when blind hope is taking off its shades and when people start again. Now he runs from day to night, when decisions have been made and consequences have been assigned and the stage is being set for the sort of awful things.

The road is silent, and when he stops to throw up on in a ditch, nothing tells him it isn’t fine.

-x-

Midnight, and he’s chucking his converse on the lawn, wiping sweat from his eyes, climbing up steps with burning legs.

He goes through the kitchen and through the hallway, quiet, because that’s how things are supposed to be in the end.

Dean’s awake, Sam knows he is, because for the past week, every time Sam has had to run again and again and again, Dean waits. He waits like someday Sam might just keep on running, and finds it funny that it’s almost true.

Sam shuts the door of their room and puffs out air, not tasting what he does in his defiance.

“You good?” Dean asks, and there are no remnants of sleep in his voice, no sign that his eyes were ever closed.

“Always,” Sam replies, making sure a smile is plastered on his face, making sure his teeth shine in the dark like a beacon of what he knows isn’t true.

He climbs up the ladder and lays down in his sweaty clothes, limbs thrumming and shaking, feet burning, eyes screwing shut and opening, lungs heaving in and out. The world is starting again in a few hours, just as it ends in the night and it terrifies him that he’s not going with it.

Because Sam will always keep running, going in a circle that never seems to stop, listening to orders, pretending he’s doing it for himself. He lies a lot, he thinks. 

If things actually ended he wouldn’t have to pretend. 

“Dean.”

If things ever began he wouldn’t have to tell himself they were going to change.

“Dean.”

Sam knows Dean’s asleep now, hears heavy, rhythmic breathing from the bunk below him.

“I’m really tired,” Sam whispers, breath coming out in slow, slow puffs. “Just thought you should know.”

**Author's Note:**

> holla at me on tumblr @koedeza  
> find more of my writing there


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